


Out of Rhythm

by lunarlychallenged



Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: Don't worry, Hanahaki Disease, Happy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-25
Updated: 2018-04-25
Packaged: 2019-04-27 13:45:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14426664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunarlychallenged/pseuds/lunarlychallenged
Summary: When the reader finds out that Michael has Hanahaki Disease, the only thing they can do is make the most of what time he has left.





	Out of Rhythm

How hard could it be to make friends? All it took was saying hello and smiling, at least according to every grownup who had ever decided that you didn’t know that you were lonely.

You did smile at people, and sometimes they smiled back. Unfortunately, smiling at somebody did not mean that you were memorable.

You tried bringing cupcakes to homeroom on your birthday, but it wasn’t like elementary school. You didn’t have a best friend to help you pass them out, and nobody cared that it was your birthday. 

You did try saying hello to people, but it kind of sucked to say hello to people who were already gone by the time you finished the second syllable.

So, how hard could it be to make friends? Pretty McFreaking Difficult, apparently.

You could smile your heart out, but the only person who smiled at you first was Christine. You could say hello to anybody you wanted, but the only person who stuck around long enough to talk back was Michael.

The two of them were almost, maybe your friends. They were the people you could count on to sit with you if there was a pep rally. Christine was loud and hard to hold a full conversation with, but she made you laugh. Michael was funny and smart, but he always seemed a little on edge when you talked. 

It was odd; you had seen him talking to Jeremy and Christine. You had watched him go through life, dancing with his headphones on and caffeinated to an almost unhealthy point. Even so, the second he looked at you, he was a deer in headlights. He would fall out of rhythm. You sometimes wondered if maybe he didn’t like you that much at all, but you didn’t have enough people to talk to for you to drop one just because you weren’t sure about him. If he wanted to be left alone, he would probably ask. Probably.

 

  
You sneezed, pressing your nose into your elbow uncomfortably when you realized that a stream of snot would come away when you shifted. Had you brought any tissues with you? No, you had assumed that any classroom you were in would have some. Unfortunately, the swift scan of the computer lab showed no signs of any.

You were supposed to be typing a paper for your history class, but very few of your classmates actually were. Michael, for instance, had spent the period playing pinball on his computer. He had uttered a distant “bless you” when you sneezed, and he grinned when he glanced over at you.

“Need a tissue?” Michael brushed his hand against your elbow briefly when he handed one off. You avoided his eyes, a little embarrassed, but he seemed as unfazed as he could ever be around you.

“Thanks,” you muttered. After a pause, you realized that the computer lab didn’t have any tissue boxes. “Do you just carry a pack around?”

“I’ve been kind of sick lately.” He avoided your eyes, so you didn’t ask anything about it.

After he mentioned being sick, you started noticing that he really was. You never noticed him sniffling or anything, but he coughed all the time. All The Time. It rattled and grated against the column of his throat, sometimes forcing him to double over just to handle the sheer force of it. Watching him made your throat ache, and the one time you put a hesitant hand against his back, he recoiled. You didn’t try to touch him again.

He was careful to do it into a tissue, but that seemed odd to you too. What teenage boy coughed into a tissue? Even stranger, he didn’t throw them away. He would ball them up and stuff them into a Ziploc bag, which he kept safely tucked away in his backpack.

You didn’t ask him about it. It wasn’t like the two of you were best friends. He was your safety net, and you were his - his something. You didn’t really know why he kept you around, but you certainly weren’t complaining. You could not imagine a better person to sit with and talk to.

 

One afternoon, he offered to drive you home from school.

“Are you serious?” You gaped up at him, pausing your systematic packing up ritual after history class.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” He smiled at you, pocket crinkling as he squeezed what you thought was his little packet of tissues.

“You’ve just never offered before,” you said quickly. You grinned at him, but it was really a little more than that. It was that delighted, wonder-struck kick in your stomach. Is was that flip of fragile hope. How hard could it be to make a friend?

Michael shrugged, smile widening. “The bus blows. I rescue the downtrodden when I can.” When you raised your eyebrows at him, he shrugged with defeat. “Okay, I rescue a downtrodden Jeremy when I can. Adding one Y/N to my list is no loss.”

“Wow, my very own knight in shining armour. Killer.”

He laughed, but when you grinned back at him, it turned into a hacking fit. He frantically yanked at his packet of tissues, struggling to get one out. You swiped it away, grabbing a tissue while he hacked into both cupped hands. You handed it to him, and he swiftly spat into it.

“Sorry,” he wheezed. “Phlegm, you know?”

You wrinkled your nose, purposefully dramatic. “TMI, Mell.”

“I’ll be by the back doors after school,” he promised. “See you then.”

 

Things escalated. Rides home turned into stops at 7-11 for snacks. Snack breaks turned into hanging out at the park for a while to kill time. That led to playing video games in his basement or doing homework in yours. Apparently becoming friends with Michael really wasn’t so difficult, but it did make you more concerned. 

You felt as though the longer you knew him, the sicker he became. He coughed more, and though he seemed to feel okay otherwise, it didn’t sit right with you. How could it? It could be lung cancer, or some kind of infection. He could be keeping his inevitable death a secret from you, like in some sad chick flick.

When you accused him of just that, he had the audacity to laugh at you. “All death is inevitable, Y/N. And you must think pretty highly of yourself to think that you’re the other half of my chick flick.”

“Maybe,” you agreed. “That would be a stupid secret to keep from me. If you’re dying, I’d want to know. I could make your last days comfortable,” you added with a smile that oozed sarcasm.

He waggled his eyebrows at you. “Well, in that case -”

You gave his soda bottle a gentle tap, making as though to knock it over. “Hey, if you aren’t dying, I don’t owe you anything.”

Not totally true - he was your best friend. You weren’t his by a long shot; Jeremy would always fill that roll, and he did it well. Still, Michael was the dearest person in your life, and you felt like you owed him something for that.

 

It was like it was meant to happen - the only explanation was that the planets had aligned in such a way that you could not have avoided discovering it.

First, Michael was not in the room. You had been taking turns playing Space Invaders, and during your turn, he had gone to use the bathroom.

Second, when he walked out of the room, he had nudged his backpack out of the way of the door. 

Third, the backpack had waited to tip over until you had finished your round. You set the controller down, the bag tipped, and you saw the tip of the baggie of tissues.

Really, the rest had fallen on your shoulders. You could have decided not to grab the bag and empty it. After all, he did it every day himself, and he would have done it again. Instead, you decided to do him a solid and clean it out yourself.

You opened the bag and tipped it over the waste basket. You shook it, hoping that you wouldn’t have to touch his nasty phlegm wads. It was kind of funny; looking back, you could have just tossed the bag in its entirety. After all, how gross was it that you just assumed that he used the same bag every day? Maybe he switched it out. Instead, you tried to empty it, and in the process, some of the tissues fell open. 

Instead of seeing a mass of yellow-ish green fluid, creamy white petals were wrapped inside. You stared, suddenly unsure that you had grabbed the right bag. Why would he have tissues full of flower petals? The petals were spotted with red, leading to a ridiculous, impossible theory. The petals were spotted with blood, wadded up in tissues, because Michael had coughed them out. 

You weren’t too surprised by the thought; intrusive thoughts were not uncommon for you. Frankly, you had thought about stranger things than coughing up flower petals. Maybe you would have brushed it off and forgotten about it, had Michael not been so upset that you found them.

“What are you doing?” Michael stood in the doorway, aghast. His face was slack with horror, and that impossible story suddenly felt far more likely.

“Why do you have a bag of bloody petals?” The words sounded almost accusatory, and you felt almost angry after saying them. Did he see what his secrecy had done to you? It was driving you totally crazy. You thought that he was coughing up flowers. 

He floundered for a second, only pulling himself together when his eyes flashed with anger. “Why are you snooping through my bag of bloody petals?”

“I’m trying to clean up your mess,” you said. “I didn’t think that this was what your mess was.”

“I can clean up my own messes,” he said, and snatched the bag away. He pulled the tissues and petals out of the trash can and shoved them back in the bag. 

“What are they?” 

He sighed. Michael looked up at you, licked his lips, and looked back down again. “God, Y/N. You ruined a perfectly good thing here, you know that?”

He walked you through a crazy story. It was, in fact, crazier than what you had imagined on your own. According to his Google searches, it was called Hanahaki Disease. Not much was known about it, but the most common conclusions were that when somebody fell in some sort of spectacularly unrequited love, flowers would take root in their lungs. They would cough up petals, almost choking on them. The only cure was for that love to be returned, at least so far as anybody had found. If it wasn’t returned, Michael told you morosely, the flowers would grow until the inflicted person was vomiting up entire blossoms, eventually choking on petals and their own blood.

Michael, apparently, had fallen in love. For a reason far beyond your own understanding, that was the hardest part for you to imagine. Your Michael, who danced and lived on 90s crap, had fallen in love, and that lucky loser didn’t feel the same way. 

He watched you, obviously waiting for you to say something. Anything at all.

“What kind of stupid manga angst story have you gotten yourself into?” The words ripped out of you, totally inappropriate and somehow exactly what you needed to say.

He gave a bark of laughter, pausing to swallow heavily as a cough tried to creep up his throat. His cheeks went pink as he choked on the cough, but he stubbornly kept his lips clamped shut around it.

“No,” you said. “Do it. I want to see.”

He looked up at you with surprise, but nodded as he let it overcome him. It was almost like vomiting, like he had said. The veins in his neck and temple bulged as he hacked. You could hear the moment the petals were torn loose from their blossoms. The tight cough turned rattly, and scarlet spotted petals shot into the open air.

You caught them in one hand, ignoring the brief pang of disgust at the dampness of them. “Wow,” you breathed. One-sided love flowers. “That person must be really something,” you said with a crooked smile.

He shrugged, panting a little. “They’re pretty great. That’s not really doing me any favors now. If I never see another gardenia for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t be long enough.”

“Do you think they could fall in love with you?” You wanted to ask who it was, but you weren’t sure he would tell you. If he had been willing to tell people about it, he probably wouldn’t have gotten into his situation in the first place.

Michael gave a crooked smile. “I think that if that was going to happen, it would have by now. This didn’t happen all at once.”

“So,” you said. You paused, knowing that the question was stupid before you even asked, but unable to hold it in. “Are you okay?”

He snorted, and if you hadn’t been looking at him, you might have thought that he was fine. But the lines on his face deepened, and his eyes went a little watery. “I really, really don’t want this to be why I die.”

You sat on the floor next to him. The last time you had tried touching him, he had pulled away. You decided to put yourself out there again and lean your head against his shoulder. This time, he stayed put. 

“They’re an idiot,” you mumbled. 

He leaned his cheek against the top of your head and sighed. “No. No, they’re perfect.”

A pang of jealousy shook you. You weren’t jealous of him, of course. To love somebody who didn’t love you back would be terrible enough on its own. To love them until you died because of it would be a million times worse. You were a little jealous of whoever he loved. He had a lot of love to give, and you couldn’t imagine passing that up.

 

“You could try to win them over,” you tried.

Michael shook his head. He expertly yielded a set of chopsticks, laughing at you when you fumbled yours. You didn’t really like sushi, but you liked watching him with his, so you schooled your face into a pleasant smile while you tried to pick up a roll.

“I’m not really the wooing type,” he said. “I prefer sneaking up on people after years of pining.”

You stuck your tongue out, carefully balancing the roll between the sticks. Mouth open wide, you ducked down to catch it, but the chopsticks twitched and dropped it. “Please. You’re a dreamboat.”

He tossed imaginary hair over his shoulder. “Hella.”

Dejected, you tried to just stab through the roll with one chopstick, but the wood wouldn’t break through. You looked into Michael’s amused eyes when you grabbed the roll between two fingers and put the entire thing in your mouth.

He smiled, shaking his head as he took a smooth bite out of his. A bead of sweat rolled down his pale face, and you stopped chewing.

“Are you okay?”

“Totally,” he said. He sounded slightly strangled, and there was a slight rattle lacing his words.

“If you need to go,” you said in a low voice, “you know where the bathroom is.”

He stood, almost running to the men’s room. You pushed the food around on your plate while you waited for him to come back. He seldom coughed up small petals anymore. Sometimes he would have to leave a room to throw up massive chunks of flower; you had watched him heave out balls of petals, sometimes with the corolla still attached.

You spent a lot of time with him. You ate lunch with him, hung out with him after school, and sometimes would meet up with him over the weekend. You watched him laugh, learn, and fall apart. You got to know his parents. His cat came to sit on your lap over his, and Michael started stocking your favorite snacks just in case you came over.

Your parents were so proud that you were making a new friend, but you thought that maybe making a friend was just as difficult as you initially thought it would be. After all, if you were good at it, you would have been able to be his friend without starting to like him as something more than that.

 

“You’re doing it wrong,” Michael said with a smug grin.

“I’m not,” you said, whilst doing it wrong. 

Every summer, Jeremy and Michael would team up to take on family events. Michael’s family wanted to take a big fishing trip? Jeremy would go along to make it more bearable. Jeremy’s mother thought that the family reunion was still a good idea? He’d bring Michael along so they could make fun of family members in a corner.

Unfortunately, Jeremy had gone to Florida with Christine’s family for a few weeks over the summer. He hadn’t been able to make it on the fishing trip, which sucked for Michael, but he had invited you along as a replacement, which was awesome for you.

You had been fishing before, but you had never had to put the bobber on the line by yourself, and you were apparently mucking it up. You handed it over to Michael with an air of defeat, but you enjoyed watching his quick fingers knot it into place.

“It’s easy,” he said. His hands blocked most of the view, but you didn’t care much about actually learning. 

“As easy as making popcorn,” you replied.

“It was one time,” he scowled. 

“You lit your hair on fire.”

He threw up his hands, watching the bobber go up in the air and land a few feet away. “It was not on fire. It burned a little, sure, but there were no actual flames.”

“The house stank,” you scoffed. You wrinkled your nose when you hooked a worm into place. It was your least favorite part of fishing, but you weren’t going to ask Michael to do it for you. 

“It’s not as though you’re a better cook,” he said. Michael smiled at you, and you rolled your eyes. He was right; you were a terrible chef. Pasta turned to a mushy mess at the bottom of a pot. Cookies smoldered. Grilled cheese charred.

“I’ll just have to find a trophy husband to cook for me,” you said breezily.

“I’ll keep an eye out,” he said dryly. “If I find a male chef, I’ll point him your way.”

Your chest went hollow. “Well,” you hedged. “Maybe he doesn’t need to be a chef. Just somebody who doesn’t burn the popcorn. If there are no actual flames, he’s a keeper.”

Michael handed the pole off to you, smiling a little when your fingers lingered against his during the pass. Your heart fluttered, but you did not allow your smile to grow. He was in love with somebody else. You saw the effects of unrequited love every day, and you did not need an even more intimate acquaintance with it.

You whipped the pole back and flicked the hook into the water. After a while, the bobber dipped into the water. Again. Again.

“You got something!” Michael leapt up from his place on the dock, hands going first for your pole, then up into his hair. “Reel it in!”

Your heart was racing as you set the hook and went to reel it in. It didn’t feel like anything much, but that didn’t stop the broad grin’s growth on your cheeks.

You yanked it out of the water, and sure enough, you had caught a four inch long perch. The two of you stared at the fish, silent as it squirmed on the hook.

Michael turned to you, face grim. “Thank God. I thought we were going to starve.”

You spluttered out a laugh. “A master catch!”

With that, the two of you erupted into laughter. Something about that miniscule fish, dwarfed by the massive pole, seemed surreal and like the height of hilarity. You gently unhooked the fish and set it free, trembling with giggles. Michael had to lay down on the dock. After a few minutes, you heard light coughs lace themselves through the chuckles. 

You watched, worried, as he succumbed to them, but they didn’t last long. He spat into the water, watching as a few guppies came up to poke at the bubbles, but no petals floated on the top of the lake.

“Maybe that was just a regular cough,” you ventured. 

Michael looked down at the water with confusion. “Maybe,” he said slowly. He looked up at you, eyes still watering with the effort of coughing. The look on his face was a strange one, and you couldn’t quite identify it. He shook his head. “Yeah, you’re probably right. That was probably just a regular cough, triggered by a beautiful fish.”

“It really was,” you said wistfully. “You’ll make a master fisherman of me yet, Mell.”

 

 

After that trip, the strangest thing happened. Michael didn’t cough as much. It was still there, punctuating conversations and tainting the joy of your talks, but it was less common. The flowers were smaller, and his face seldom turned a deep plum while he coughed them out.

It was infuriating how little you could find about Hanahaki Disease. Could it be that he had fallen out of love with the person? Was that how it worked? No sources seemed sure. Maybe the person had fallen in love with Michael. It was a horrifying and wonderful possibility, all at once. You would get to keep him, but you would also be losing him to somebody else.

The school musical was Urinetown - a satiric musical with an album that you had disliked the first time you listened to it. The words were sometimes hard to understand, most of the cast seemed unimpressive to you, though you were no real musician yourself, and the characters were unappealing.

Christine, unfortunately, had been cast as the female lead. It was a perfect role for her, but it meant that she sang the songs all the time. She sang between classes, at the lunch table, and while she sat in Michael’s basement with the lot of you. She sang it nonstop, and it had gotten you hooked on the music.

Even when she and Jeremy were gone, you and Michael ended up playing the album. One afternoon, the two of you were dramatically enacting how you imagined “Follow Your Heart” going. Michael was a gruff, unfeeling Bobby Strong. You were a shrill, melodramatic Hope Cladwell. In a fit of drama, you pressed your ear to his chest so you could “listen to his heart.”

Your words faltered. His heart was racing. Maybe that wasn’t so strange; after all, musical reenactments could take a lot out of a person. It wasn’t the way his heart sped up that gave you a pause, at least not entirely. The real revelation came from the fact that you could hear him breathing, and there wasn’t the slightest rattle to his words. His breath came clear and strong, and his heart was racing, and you had your face pressed against his torso.

The only cure for Hanahaki Disease came from the victim’s love being returned. If Michael was doing better, it had to be because the object of his affections loved him back. That wasn’t a wild concept to you. Getting to know Michael better had just cemented your certainty that he deserved every ounce of love in the universe. The trouble was, since finding out that Michael was sick, the only person who had been spending more time with him was you.

You, who had so flustered him before you became true friends. You, who had seemed to throw off his groove. You. Maybe you had been wrong, back before you became friends. Maybe the problem hadn’t been that he was losing his rhythm around you. Maybe he had been losing his rhythm because he was starting to keep time with you.

“Well?” Michael asked. “What was it?” He looked at you, a little apprehensive. You realized that you had completely abandoned the song. 

Instead of singing back to him, you took his face into your hands and pressed your lips against his. As always, he was very warm. You had never touched his face before, but it was soft and you could feel his cheeks curve under your hands as he started to smile.

“I don’t think that was what my heart was saying,” he said.

“Sorry,” you grinned. “That must have been mine. My bad.”

“I’ve been feeling a lot better,” he said carefully. His eyes were wide behind his thick glasses, a little afraid despite the delight dancing in them.

“You should have said it was me,” you said. You wanted to be angry, but that stupid smile on his face was mirrored on yours.

“And here I thought that my wooing strategy worked.”

Your eyebrows shot up. “That was your plan. Seduce me with friendship?”

He pressed his lips against yours again, swift and hard. “It worked, didn’t it? Even if it hadn’t, at least I would have gotten to spend time with you instead of wallowing myself to death.”

Your arms wove themselves around his neck so you could play with the hair at the nape of his neck. “You should have said something.”

“I’ll make up for it,” he promised. “I love you. I love you, and I hate gardenias.”

“I like them,” you grinned. “Isn’t it so nice that we have our own flower? How couple-y of us.”

He snorted. “That is not our flower.” When you laughed, he leaned in to kiss away the sound.


End file.
